Ep 572 Selling Freshly to Nestle for $1.5B and Keeping $100M

Every founder faces a choice at some point: own all of a business you can finance yourself, or give up most of it to raise the capital for something much bigger. Mike Wystrach chose the second path. He co-founded Freshly in 2012, raised more than $100 million in venture capital and another $50 million in venture debt, and by the time Nestle acquired the company for $1.5 billion in 2020 he owned just under 10 percent. He walked away with roughly $100 million. Mike learned the mechanics of a venture term sheet while he was negotiating one, and in this episode he breaks down the terms that sit behind a headline valuation and decide what a founder actually keeps if they take outside money.